Time flies for new Tiverton High School graduates

There was a quick answer the imminent graduates offered, often, when asked how it felt to be in the high school as a student for the last time. “It happened really fast,” Sara Massa said. “It is all a little nerve-wracking.”

“It is nerve-wracking,” classmate Mackenzie Mello said when asked a few minutes later. “It is also bittersweet.

“It just seems like it happened so fast.”

Get used to it, language teacher Dennis Soares said. Soares, the commencement speaker, warned students that a lot of life will speed by.

“This is your night, don’t forget it,” Soares said. “Fourteen years ago, I sat in these seats and wondered what tomorrow would bring.”

His advice: Life is short and it passes quickly. Try to be happy.

Tiverton High School gave out 128 diplomas Friday, offering one last ceremony before sending the 2014 class of Tiverton Tigers out into the world.

“It is good to move on, but it is tough to leave here,” said Class of 2014 President Nathan Carvalho.

Carvalho addressed the class, as did salutatorian Samantha Rollings and valedictorian Avery Pacheco.

Rollings asked classmates to think about how much the world changed since they entered kindergarten. It would continue to change and they should, too, she said.

“Use your opportunities to go after possibilities,” she said. “Make sure to see the lights of Paris.”

Valedictorian Pacheco asked classmates to consider how they changed each other.

“We have all built off of one another,” she said.

Speakers noted that all the graduates wore purple ribbons on their gowns — a remembrance for Megan Cordeiro, their classmate who died of cancer when they were in the sixth grade.

That experience brought them closer as a class, Carvalho said.

He and other speakers told graduates to embrace the changes life will bring and to look for the good that even bad experiences can bring them.

For some, life’s surprises would begin more quickly than others.

As graduation was held, Allison Fernandes, Class of 2012, and Jocelyn McMahan, Class of 2008, attached a dozen balloons, streamers and the numbers “2014” on a black Volvo owned by their friend, E.J. Sevigny.

“He has no idea we are doing this,” Fernandes said. “No idea at all.”

But one thing will not be a surprise, one thing will not change, Carvalho said. No matter where they go or what they do, they will be Tiverton High School graduate.

“Never forget where you came from,” he said. “Once a Tiger, always a Tiger.”